Salvation from the Soul

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Month: March 2006

Trapped on a small piece of land in the middle of the ocean? Got an iPod? well, you might like to have these albums to keep your rockin’ till God-knows when your fingers would crack of drawing SOS’ on the sand. Switch on your Ipod and Heaven can wait!

Ozzy Osbourne’s Blizzard of Oz (1980): Out of Black Sabbath, Ozzy wanted to do something different. Tagged with Guitar hero Randy Rhoads (RIP), they made the best album recorded by Ozzy till now. I still listen to this one!!

Deep Purple’s In Rock (1970): The best lineup at their best time, Gillan, Glover, Lord, Paice and Blackmore rocked the world with this album. Forget Machine Head, this is Purple!

Iced Earth’s The Dark Saga (1996): Equipped with a new singer, tried a new format (Burnt Offerings) and placing bets on a new territory for the band: a concept album. Teaming with McFlarin, Iced Earth produced their best album ever using basic melodies and simple orchestration. The story of the band after this album became a dark saga.

Dream Theater’s Scenes from a memory (1999): Taking the idea from a song in their previous album (Images & Words), Dream Theater produced the most complicated and alluring concept album to be made by a progressive rock band in our current time. You have to listen to this album like more than 2 times to get it. I think I listened to it like 5 times already and I can’t stop thinking about it. I was touched by it.

Rainbow’s Rising (1977): Rainbow, Blackmore and Dio, the holy trinity. I’d sell my soul to see them live. In this album you’re gonna hear Cozy Powell (RIP) smashing drums like you’ve never heard him before. All rock giants agree that this is the heaviest and the best Rainbow sound to be heard and you gotta believe them, cuz when the CD starts, you’ll go crackin’!! Just listen to Stargazer and A light in the black.

Led Zeppelin’s first four albums (1969/1971): I think there’s no need to say anymore about Led Zeppelin because the name stands out for itself. I bought this bootlegged hits tape from Fahaheel and when I was taking my summer class in Carbondale, man, that tape was blastin’ my Jeep speakers! Dýer Maker was running all day long! Made my sweet summer memories come true!

Dio’s Holy Diver (1982): Till this day, this album blows our sound systems. Tagged with new face on the scene, Vivian Campbell, Dio left Sabbah in its disastrous case to pursue a successful solo career. Correction: Dio left Sabbath to write History.

Black Sabbath’s Heaven & Hell (1980): Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler dropped Ozzy Osbourne to move the band to a better place, and they were right about it. Recruiting Dio to write the greatest Sabbath album ever, Heaven and Hell is surely in the top ten of any hard rock album list because you just can’t ignore its power. I haven’t heard till now any album as strong and good as this one. Dio’s magic and Iommi’s riffs stole our souls.

Iron Maiden’s Powerslave (1984): After trying out Bruce Dickenson in Number of the beast, Iron Maiden stole the world in their best live tour and their acclaimed album, Powerslave. From 1984 till early 90s, Iron Maiden was Rock and Rock was Iron Maiden. You just can’t live without getting this!

Demons & Wizards’ Self titled (2000): Iced Earth and Blind Guardian teaming up to make an album? it sounded like too good to be true. But when the news hit the media, rockers went frenzy. Gaining musical awards due to its musical quality, this collaboration should have been named the dream team. You truly gotta listen to this!

This was my first visit to this restaurant. I’ve seen it many times while I drove by Salmiya, and wondered how the food would taste like, since Kuwait is one of the last places in earth where you might want to try Chinese food. I’ve craved noodles today, and asked my friend to try this restaurant, where after having lunch there, it motivated me to create write this post and start my own blog.

The restaurant:
The atmosphere of this restaurant is OK, though there was no background music playing at all (it wasn’t a prayer time anyway). The view was kinda of bad since it was overlooking some empty parking lots, full of sand. So the view was just plain yellowish. There was no A/C going on, which made me wonder if this place has any. The menu looked promising, though after checking it twice, I realized that it had only about 4-5 items of noodles. I mean the restaurant is named “Noodles” and the logo shows chopstick with noodles in it, this place barely had any, which was kinda of sad. I noticed that there was a note in the menu that goes like “Black mushrooms are added upon request”. Another note went like “Friend rice (without eggs)”. I wondered if this restaurant was going cheap on the customers, although the prices were reasonable. Me and my friend love hot & sour soup, which is one of the rarest food items in Kuwait to be found perfected or at least brought close to the Chinese taste standard. So we gambled and ordered two soup cups, without the fishy prawns, and confirmed the flavor to be as usual, spicy. For a side dish, we thought that dim sum would be cool, but our enjoyment came to an end when the waiter told us that it would take around 30 minutes to prepare it, so we threw that one out and ordered a set of 6 pieces of shrimp on toast, which should taste good. I craved Mongolian beef, which I was addicted to back in the states, so I ordered a dish of Mongolian beef with “black mushroom”, and a dish of vegetable fried rice with ”eggs”. My friend ordered mushroom noodles with cashew.

Hot & sour soup:
I never tasted anything as sour as this one. I realized that excessive amounts of soy sauce, vinegar and lemon was added to create this soup. I mean, the first few spoons and I realized that I was trying something which should be discarded as a hazardous mixture. I can’t imagine how people did try this soup before. My eyes went watery and I couldn’t eat this. This was the first phase of what to come.

Shrimp on toast:
Not as well done as Little Dragon Restaurant’s (Next Review, hopefully), smaller in size, and had excessive amount of sesame seeds on it, which is unusual for this dish. It tasted okay. But the layer of shrimp paste was pretty thin.

Vegetable fried rice with eggs:
The type of rice used in this dish wasn’t the correct type, since it was long and dry, not very good for a fried rice dish. Also, mushroom was mistakenly included in the mixture. Overall, the rice was dry.

Mongolian Beef with black mushroom:
I don’t know, but this was definitely not Mongolian beef. I mean, give or take, the main ingredients of a Mongolian beef dish are slices of beef in sauce, slices of onion and green onion shoots and some times maybe even sliced pieces of carrot and it goes like that. But I don’t think green pepper, and some other stuff I didn’t recognize are part of it. The dish was okay, but not original. I just want to know where they do they bring their recipes from.

Mushroom noodles with cashew:
My friend suffered through this dish. At first glance, I knew that they used the commercially cheap instant noodles ”Indomi“, which is not suitable at all for restaurant serving (college food). The pack of this noodles cost around 30 fils or something like that, and to be charged more than 1 KD is just rip-off. My friend could have had it at home for not cost at all. Adding mushroom, cashew and green pepper meant nothing to the sole taste of this dish. The noodles itself were pretty dry since they dried it of its broth.

Final judgment:
Trust me, after this first time, I wouldn’t bother for a second for the next 20 years to come. I felt sad because we paid 11.500 KD for a lunch which I did best my best to overlook its taste. If you hate somebody, take him there.